Forever 21 Accused of Stealing Designs from Local Canadian Designers

According to the Financial Post, there is a new navy-and-white cardigan at Forever 21 that’s creating quite the buzz. For Forever 21 shoppers, the new cardigan is great. It’s fun, reasonably priced and pretty trendy. However for a local metro Vancouver clothing company, the new Forever 21 Cardigan is a slap in the face.

Brian Hirano of Granted Clothing through instagram realized that Forever 21 was re-creating his company’s cardigan, obviously without their approval. Now if you take a look, and we agree with Brian – the cardigan from Forever 21 doesn’t just resemble the Granted Clothing cardigan… it’s a blatant ripoff.

Brian told the Financial Post that after seeing the sweater on Instagram, he quickly went to the Forever 21 website and discovered that the American retailer was selling not only the original Cardigan found on Instagram but one other Cardigan that was an exact copy.

“I was quite disappointed, to be honest with you. I’ve calmed down quite a bit since then, but it’s definitely not professional in any industry,”

See Granted Clothing’s cardigan is completely hand-made and uses superior wool, while Forever 21’s is made out of an imported acrylic-wool blend making it drastically cheaper then Granted’s version.
With the Granted Cardigan priced at $385, it seems almost unfair that Forever 21 can sell the exact same design for $47.90.

While Granted has claimed that they aren’t sure how they are going to legally respond, According to the Financial Post, a media Spokespeople for Forever 21 has yet to comment. This isn’t the first time a huge company has ripped off local designers either, a similar situation happened to Urban Outfitters a while back as well.